


Maiden of the West

by A_Cold_Wind_Blows



Category: A Song of Ice and Fire & Related Fandoms, A Song of Ice and Fire - George R. R. Martin, Game of Thrones (TV)
Genre: A whole lotta that, Alternate Universe - Western, Blood and Violence, Bodice-Ripper, Canon-Typical Violence, Drinking, F/M, Older Man/Younger Woman, Sexual Content, Sexual Tension, Underage Drinking
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-10-20
Updated: 2017-10-20
Packaged: 2019-01-20 09:39:56
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Rape/Non-Con, Underage
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,757
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12430074
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/A_Cold_Wind_Blows/pseuds/A_Cold_Wind_Blows
Summary: Sansa Stark was set to marry her long-time intended Joffrey Baratheon in the dreamy far-off lands of the American Frontier. But the day before she arrives by train, her fiance is murdered in an old-fashioned high-noon gun duel!Penniless and unable to return home to Boston, Sansa resolves to forge a new life for herself and her sister in the West. Ironically her only ally in these dangerous lands is the very man who shot and killed her fiance, the terrifying yet fascinating gunslinger Jon Snow…





	Maiden of the West

**Author's Note:**

  * Inspired by [Ivory & Steel](https://archiveofourown.org/works/9790025) by [vivilove](https://archiveofourown.org/users/vivilove/pseuds/vivilove). 



> So, as some of you may know, I have a Modern Au Jon/Sansa story called Stupid Sexy Jon Snow that I've been writing for a while but haven't updated in a couple of months. Well, long story short, I got the writer's block pretty bad, so I thought the only thing that might help was writing something entirely different.
> 
> Then I read vivilove's amaaaaaazing Western AU Jon/Sansa story, Ivory and Steel, and I just had to give this AU my own spin. So here we go...

She was falling into a deep, deep inky blackness. It was the old stone well outside their family estate grounds, near the lichyards, the burial place of men and women who’d sworn their loyalty to her mother’s family. Mother said that they had served well and with honor, but deep below the earth, Sansa could hear them whispering. Their words were of regret and anguish, bitterness and insensibility.

Sansa wondered why all those people had to die.

Her leg kicked into the mattress, snapping her awake. The sudden movement ached immediately like a dagger of hot agony in her calf. She rolled over in her furor, panting and counting to ten as she did whenever she had to endure her monthly burden. Thankfully the pain was much briefer in this case.

Releasing the bed sheets from her teeth, Sansa felt a chill pass through her even as the bright morning sun cracked through the thinly veiled curtains. She responsibly and regrettably beat her hand out to throttle the draperies, sending shattering shards of sunlight into her eyes.

Her head ached, as it always did these past nights.

_The blasted wine is going to be the death of me._

The town’s water supply had been rotted by bandits for the past four days. A city that boasted about having the highest population in the entire western frontier, Sansa had expected Omaha, Nebraska to be in a panic after such news. Apparently though, living on nothing to drink but whiskey, wine, and various rums and brandies was just fine to the populace, these travelled men who had built their own metropolis from the dung heap it once was, into the glowing star it was now that basked so heavenly in God’s good graces.

Or at least, Sansa recalled saying something to that effect when she toasted the hotel bar patrons with her fifth glass of whiskey. She’d grown to like whiskey. Wine would always be her favorite, a sweet vintage preferably, but whiskey made her sweat in the bodice less than rum and left her deliriously warm on colder nights.

Shaking the pain and regrets from her eyes, Sansa changed out of her sleeping clothes before shaking Arya awake as well so they might greet the day together. Arya grumbled about wanting to see the stables, but Sansa made her promise to stay in the hotel’s main building, even as she knew her little sister would do no such thing

The first stop of the day was the post office, always the post office. Sansa sometimes would forget about checking it for a day or two, and then she would feel so guilty that she would have to spend her whole next day waiting at the post office, just to see if there was an emergency afternoon telegram. The boys in the Hardison’s restaurant and the girls in the hotel lounge would always ask where she’d been hiding all day, and Sansa would lie and say she’d spent her time praying at church. It was a harmless lie, supported by the fact that Sansa had received no letters in a gallingly long time.

So when she gave the postal worker her name and he handed her a thick packet of paper notes, Sansa almost insisted there was a mistake. Surely not, after all this time?

She tore the first one open right there, careful not to damage the crisp, dyed typewriter paper from her father’s law offices in Massachusetts. The sight of it gave Sansa hope and courage and tears and she almost made a fool of herself until the worker gave a little cough and she fled.

Fled all the way back to the hotel. For some reason that could only be nerves, she took a deep breath first before opening the double doors into the main lobby. The chairs at the bar were put up for now, but Sansa opted to sit back in the long velvet-draped sofa by the check-in desk, expertly balancing her weight back into the flexible whale bone frame of her gown’s crinolette. Frontier women tended to favor less European-styled fashions in their gowns, but Sansa would always prefer them for they helped her to remember her status.

After all, it was all she had left to remember her old life. Her parents. Her little brothers. Robb.

The letter from her father stated that he was leaving the family estates in Kilkenney, and that he would travel to America by ship before the end of the year. Once he took back control of his American assets, and looked into his wife and youngest children, he would reach out for her and her sister shortly after. He apologized for it not being sooner, and said he thought of Sansa and Arya in their plight. That warmed Sansa’s heart as much as it filled her with guilt.

The second letter was from her mother, reporting much of the first’s news, only adding that she hoped her old childhood friend and brother-in-law Petyr Baelish was looking after Sansa well enough. The words made Sansa furious and ashamed once more, so much so that she couldn’t finish the rest of the letter and piled it away to read the next.

This one had come east, not west, marked from a post office in Wyoming. Sansa had read in the newspaper last week that the Wyoming territory had just given women the vote, and she decided to take that as a sign from God. She opened the letter and was delighted to see the name at the bottom.

It seemed there was a path forward after all.

She found Arya later that afternoon after a brisk lunch with the other ladies and important wives, and told her the good news. Arya however didn’t react as expected, though that was of course an entirely expected type of reaction for the youngest Stark daughter.

“Leave? Now? Why would we leave?” Arya whispered by the silent piano while Sansa stood a foot away, blocked from snooping eyes by a curtain.

“Arya, we cannot stay here forever. It is time that I found a husband, started a life, raised children, and meanwhile we’ll get you settled so you can finish your schooling. Perhaps start the unavoidably laborious effort of finding you a husband as well.”

“Sansa… none of that matters out here.”

There was a brief pause as Sansa tried not to scream. “Of course it matters, why would you say something like that?”

“No, it doesn’t,” Arya said in the brattiest tone that Sansa had ever heard since she was at that age herself. “There are no balls or parties or fancy galas out in the desert Sansa. Everything is still being built. People just work all day and fuck all nigh-”

“Stop that! We’re not in the saloon!” Sansa shouted before she glanced about to make sure the room was scarcely populated. “And that is their lot in life, but we have the chance to take control of our own lives, and this is the way.”

“No, it’s not! You’re just marrying some cousin of a second cousin!”

“Mr. Hardyng is set to inherit a very profitable mining company!” Sansa said. “There’s still gold out in the southwestern passes of the Wyoming territories, everyone knows that.”

“Who cares!?” Arya shouted. “We have a good life here, it’s not that different from Boston. Let’s just move out of the hotel and go live with Uncle Petyr and Aunt Lysa.”

Sansa still couldn’t help but shiver at that. 

“He’s been good to us Sansa.” Arya continued, gripping the front of her dress between her fingers, threatening the lacing there like she always did. Eventually she let out a breath that seemed to release all the tension in her body and her fire was gone. Instead she looked to Sansa with something like a plea in her eyes. 

“I don’t get it. You like it here too, don’t you?” 

“I do,” Sansa admitted guiltily.

It was dirty city, filled with mud, dirt, prostitutes, dirt, gambling, deadly brawls, and sometimes even explosions when dynamite was mishandled by survey crews, which only caused even more dirt. Though the Transcontinental rail line was finally complete in the last year, men still searched the even farther reaches of these desert plains and colorful mountains, unbound and majestic, for other paths. Everyone was always alive, searching, hoping, seeking their fortunes in this land given to them by God. Homes and lives and dreams came for their second chances from all over the world, searching for their place.

Omaha had become a comfortable little routine for Sansa, a place where she could pretend she was in one of her cheap dime-store novels about lone gunmans and violent Indians, monsters out in the mountain caverns, and Devil-worshippers in the forests glens. A frightening land that was not yet tamed by good Christian light.

Yet somehow underneath all that… was life lived fully. 

The knaves, the mongrels, the whores, the bounty hunters, the miners, the railroad workers, and most of all the US Marshalls and the handsome Union soldiers, Sansa loved them all. She was always entranced and enticed by new people, and here they poured into the city seemingly every day. Beginnings, falls, redemptions, deaths… in just a few weeks she’d seen them all. And each one was a story that would one day become the legends and myths of this land and the heroes who had braved its harsh conditions. 

When they’d first arrived, before things became tricky, Sansa had had fantasies of some handsome man like her father or the dashing war hero president, Ulyssess S. Grant, declaring that they would conquer all the unknown lands for her, the mysterious red-haired beauty, so rapturous that she was manifest destiny herself walking among them.

“So let’s just stay!” Arya groused, shaking Sansa from her romantic daydreams.

“Arya, we have to think of father,” she said, hoping to appeal to Arya’s undoubted love for the man who had taught them what good men looked like. “Uncle… Petyr has been good to us, a-a true friend. And father would say that friends are there to lift us up when we fall, but it is on us to walk again, or we take advantage of their generosity.”

“Ugh!” Arya sneered before she gave a relenting nod. “Fine, fine, you’re right. I guess it was too covetous of me to pray that Joffrey’s demise would release us from womanly fates.”

“Stop that!” Sansa snapped. “Your fate need not be mine. You may marry if you like, or become a teacher if you prefer, even study nursing if you show the inclination. Perhaps you could even take up business like father, the good Lord knows I never had a head for it but maybe you do. Anything is possible out here Arya. Wyoming just gave women the vote you know.”

“What!?” That got Arya’s attention like Sansa thought it would.

“Maybe you could become a solicitor general or a state attorney. The first woman state attorney.”

“Oh I’ll be a blacksmith before that,” Arya grinned. “Being a judge might be fun though.”

Sansa shook her head and led Arya up to their room so they could bathe for supper. She finished before Arya and instructed her sister to scrub her hair well. Sansa would write a letter accepting the marriage proposal to Mr. Hardyng, and hopefully if they received his reply before too long, Sansa and Arya could be on a train to Cheyenne by week’s end.

There was just one thing she would need to take care of first, her final piece of business before leaving this crossroads of industry and dreams, and it was something she wished to do away from Arya’s curious eyes.

She walked through the main street, greeting many a finely-dressed businessman and their equally capable wives, for surely that was the only way such women would dare to follow their husbands to this dangerous and intractable land. Once she made it to the end of the shops and the restaurants and credit unions, she turned right into the less-built, more seedy parts of this city in the desert.

Here there were less stately institutions, such as whorehouses, opium dens, and most frighteningly in Sansa’s opinion, the munitions and ammo stores. She had heard a rumor that some of the stores would even sell you old dynamite stolen from railroad prospectors, for whatever scurrilous purpose bandits or other such criminals might have.

She stopped in front of the Silken Fox, a notorious house of flesh that danced a strange balance between being one of the most disreputable establishments in Omaha, and yet also served up some of the most expensive, foreign women. Once Sansa would have been horrified at the prospect of entering such an establishment, but now she barely blinked when she pushed past the double-doors.

In some ways the main floor was not so different from the town’s main saloon. There were tables for cards, a piano in back for some music, and a bar. The small female touches were what drew the eye however. Stairwells and counters were covered in laced cloth, smells of perfumes and body oils drifted from every direction, and not a single woman wore a proper petticoat. The clientele was all scurried off, now that the judgement of sunlight was out, to create an effect that only women were here in this strange feminine paradise.

“Well, well, what have we here?”

Sansa turned to see a woman of strikingly attractive look, both in dress and skin color. She wore an evening gown of such spectacular fashion, with such remarkable views of her dark heaving breasts that it could only be a French design. Her skin was the color of a dark and warm English tea, with volcanically brown eyes that held such a scintillating heat that even Sansa felt flushed.

“Where is the madam of this establishment?” Sansa asked in as neutral tone as possible.

“You’re speaking to her my little cherry blossom,” the woman purred, causing Sansa to shiver some and her cheeks to become unnecessarily heated. “I am Chataya, purveyor of pleasant pleading and suffering sighs. Have you come to join my flock my little Scarlet? My last auburn beauty went off and married a prospector, too charming that one was.”

Sansa hadn’t even noticed that the woman was walking toward her until the madam’s hand drew up and traced a finger over her cheek. A fortnight ago Sansa would have been scandalized that a whore, a black-skinned whore at that, would have dared to touch her in such an intimate and uninvited way, no matter her personal charm. Now though, she just saw it as the way of things. The East Coast debutante she once was still had some European ideas on decorum and propriety that couldn’t last in the heat of this brave new world.

“I cannot say that I have,” Sansa answered politely, delicately brushing the woman’s hand away before trying to show her most charming smile. “I am here to see one of your clientele.”

“Such a shame,” Chataya hummed. “I know the man you seek. I’ll have him called down.”

“No need, I’ll see to him.”

Sansa brushed past the madam and a few more girls by the staircase, pushing herself forward before she lost the feeling of the wind at her back. She wanted to get her response to the Post Office today, and she had other arrangements to make if they were to leave soon and discreetly. This was a matter that she needed done, and haste would often help make medicine go down better.

All the rooms were open with preening, seductive (she supposed) noises coming from each one. Sansa brushed past all of them until she came to a closed door at the end of the hall, the “Presidential” suite as it was labeled. Sansa felt some affront at that but like so many things, sighed it off and opened the door without knocking.

As expected, the room was full of activity. A small table was in the corner to her right, with two girls sitting in chairs in their stockings and chemises and naught else, bickering over a game of cards. A third girl, with skin almost as dark as Chataya’s, was laying on her back in only knee-length drawers across the bed, a book in her hands as her breasts lay flat and spilled under her arms. She was the only one who stopped to take notice of Sansa’s entrance.

An aluminum bathing tub was placed on the opposite side of the room, a raven-haired woman in a pink bodice and beige, ripped stockings standing at one end while a blonde woman was sitting naked and dripping inside the tub on the other end, attending the only male occupant of the room. The blonde was brushing a lathered rag across a wiry plane of dark curling hair and faded white scars, while the raven-haired one was busy rubbing oils over the man’s back and shoulders in a way that didn’t seem entirely innocent.

“I’m all paid up through the week. Tell Chataya she can have her favorites back only when I’m done with them.”

“Mr. Snow, she ain’t one of the girls,” the dark-skinned bookworm announced to the room.

The man in question lifted the old, tan leather hat from over his eyes and placed it properly over the thick, dark-brown hair that had been sluiced with grease and blood when Sansa first met him. Apparently three weeks of decadent pampering from multitudes of paid women could do wonders for cleaning off the grime of the open trails, even from hair as lustrous and tangled as this man’s.

“Miss Stark.” 

He spoke her name but said aught else, staring at her in neither annoyance nor admiration. The man was as charming as a stone when he wasn’t busy being a cur.

“Mr. Snow,” Sansa said in identical tone, even as the sight of so much sin and skin had made her voice creak with naïve discomfort. “I have come to make a business proposition, one which has delicate timing that must be kept in mind, otherwise I would not bother you here in your…”

She wasn’t sure how to finish that statement. The brutish thug said naught else, letting her dangle on the thread of her words like a fool. His face was still implacable behind those grey daggers that resembled eyes and the dark beard that peppered his face, down to that sharp, lupine jaw. He had the look of someone who had never cared for sunlight or fanciful things. A man who might shoot you for talking out of turn when he was in a dark mood, or challenge you to a duel over a twisted sense of Frontier honor.

As he had done when he murdered her fiancé.

_Though the Lord knows I did not weep when I saw Joff in that pine box._

“My sister and I would like to board the train set for Cheyenne in three days’ time,” Sansa continued after the silence was broken by the titters of one of the card-playing women. “Once we arrive by train, we will need protection when we ride the carriage trail to South Pass City.”

“Carriage trail?” the man grunted, the golden-haired waif distracted from her washing and now focused on their exchange. “You ain’t gonna take the train directly to those southwestern passes? I heard they was a railroad town out there.”

“Yes, well… I have enough money to get us to Cheyenne, but not for the full costs of a longer trip. Not if I want to keep us from becoming beggars.”

She felt no need to hide their money troubles from this man, considering he was the sole cause of their plight. Without Joffrey’s promissory notes of credit, or the money his footmen and body-men had taken with them once they were assured their master was unquestionably slain, Sansa had been left destitute. She and Arya had had to scrounge by on favors and pocket change in the previous weeks, so they had little money on hand to spend. And now, Sansa did not have time to ask for funds to be wired from her possible, newly intended.

_Not if I’m to leave this place in a timely fashion._

“If you ain’t got the money for a train, I can presume you can’t afford my services.”

Sansa started at that. “Well, I… I have 50 dollars to offer-”

“Axell Florent just skipped town on a debtor’s charge with the Tyrell Banking Company. They’re offering a $1,100.00-dollar reward on him being brought back alive. $700.00 Dead. Enough to buy the hand of Marei or Zei here ten times over.”

“Awww, you gonna buy us up for yourself there Mr. Snow?” the dark-haired girl tittered as she wrapped her twin-tatooed forearms around his glistening neck. “Make us your wives for a few months like them Mormons do and keep us safe from our more rougher patrons?”

“Quiet,” he grunted, causing her to giggle and place a kiss along his jaw but otherwise returning to silence when she released him from her embrace. “I ain’t done no unpaid work since the war ended, for any man, and I ain’t about to start now.”

“But I am no man,” Sansa huffed. “And you are obliged to me in this Jon Snow. You owe me a debt.”

“Your husband all but killed hisself, challenging me to a duel like that, in front of lawmen of all people.” Even as he made fastidious excuses, his tone did not change in the least to show any shame. “His foolishness killed him that day Miss Stark, not I.”

“That is all very well and good, and perhaps there is a grain of truth in that,” Sansa said, unperturbed by the cold iron confidence in his voice. “But just as Joffrey did not see the consequences to his actions, neither do you now.”

“Pardon?” he drawled.

“My sister and I have nowhere to go,” Sansa admitted, covering up the pain of that truth with venom that she tried to conjure up whenever she saw this man. “Now, no thanks to you, I have found us a place where we can settle and build new lives. Where I can marry as previously intended by my parents. My only vex is getting us to this new home. And seeing as you killed our only means, you must take my husband’s place in keeping us safe.”

“You’re to become Mr. Snow’s wife?” the dripping wet-blonde asked, agape at Sansa, as if her own appearance was not intrinsically more shocking than such an idea. Maybe it wasn’t.

“Of course not!” Sansa sneered, causing the girl to shrink back. “I only mean that Mr. Snow owes me a debt that is greater than any one that money can replace. He killed the man that I loved, the man who was supposed to give me children to dote upon into my old age. What he owes me is an older kind of price. A blood debt, of ancient and respected kind. Surely such things exist in all places, even out here in these lawless lands.”

She felt like she was panting after speaking so much at such a rapid clip, but Jon Snow continued to appear unaffected.

Until he nodded.

With a startling splash, the shadowed gunman rose from the tub in all his naked glory, causing his blonde bath mate to give a yelp of surprise as she slipped off his lap. Like a crazed mongrel or some sort of petulant child, Jon Snow made no move to cover his shame or at least find some long johns or at least a rag to cover his manhood. Sansa had to make sure to keep her eyes on his, and in turn his gaze did not waver. She held a mad hope that he was enthralled by her disaffected manner at this brazen show.

“Aly sweetheart, put down that romance tale you’re sightin’ and get me a bottle of that there cider beer from last night.”

The dark-skinned girl on the bed quickly rolled over and rose, traipsing over to the windowsill and grabbing a brown bottle from a collection of others. Pulling the cork out with a loud hiccup, she gave Sansa an approachable smile before handing it to Mr. Snow. He snatched it with frightening agility and took a long pull, the drink lingering at his lips for a drawn-out moment. Sansa couldn’t help but watch his throat as he swallowed one, two, then three gulps. For not the first time, spurious thoughts and craving came over Sansa.

_Not for this man. Never for this man! Stop it!!_

And yet when he finished his drink, a trickle of liquid dribbled down from the corner of his lips, slipping down into his beard before finishing its trail along that captivating neck. Sansa felt a shortness of breath come over her. Shamefully she was peppered with memories of a time when she was still just a girl, curious of becoming a woman, and how she would take to watching some of the stable boys at her father’s estate at times when they changed from their riding clothes back into their servant garbs. Especially some of the taller ones.

Jon Snow was tall in a similar way. He had the look of a much Godlier man at times. She remembered thinking that when she first met him, before discovering who he was.

“Now you.”

She realized he was offering the bottle to her, so she took it without question. Boldness was the only thing some people out here respected in a woman, she had long ago deduced, so she tilted the bottle back in theatrical flourish and swallowed down as much of the liquid as she might before tasting it. There was a faint hint of apple, so perhaps it was indeed a cider, but it just as easily could have been grain alcohol mixed with confectionery sugar.

When she could take no more, she quickly wiped the trails of liquid that had sprouted up on her cheeks and lips, reckoning that she wouldn’t look as treacherously handsome as Mr. Snow if it dripped down to her bodice.

“It’s agreed then.”

“W-what?” Sansa asked with a burning croak. It wasn’t as strong as whiskey, but it wasn’t nothing.

“I’ll escort you and your sister, as agreed, for $50.00 to South Pass City. Half now, and half when you’re delivered into the arms of your newly intended.”

“I- thank you kindly.” Sansa was confused but delighted that this had gone so well. Now she felt she should leave swiftly as possible, before Mr. Snow changed his mind. 

Or had any other bright ideas about the terms of their arrangement.

“I shall see you in three days’ time, at the station.”

Jon Snow simply nodded and started drinking from the brown bottle again, so Sansa left him to it. Now that she had this business out of the way, she could start planning for their trip. She turned down the stairs and gave a civil nod to Chataya as she left. When she was greeted by the awakening air of Omaha, she was startled by an intrusive thought in all her planning.

_Arya and I will be alone with this man for at least a week. How can I trust his intentions? He might cut our throats the day we ride out into the plains, and only that if we’re lucky._

Yet in some strange fit of lunacy… Sansa found herself trusting the man. That same instinct from when she first met him did not fade even now. The man who had murdered her husband in cold blood. The man who, according to rumor, spent more time in the company of whores and Indians than he did good, God-fearing citizens. A man who, some said, wasn’t a man at all but some sort of peculiar beast that took on human shape when in the company of Christ.

_We shall survive the trip with him, no matter what trouble comes. Even if that trouble is Jon Snow himself. Arya has kept her promise and stayed brave. Now I must answer that child’s bravery with conviction._

Sansa thought she could do it. She was an American after all. And women in Wyoming had just gotten the vote. It seemed women could do anything in this brave new world.

**Author's Note:**

> Let me know what you think!


End file.
